The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an, understanding of the present invention. However, it should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgment or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the application.
A number of Mobile Network Operators (“MNOs”) offer value added services (“VASs”). Whether run by the MNO themselves or third party service providers, these services identify their customers by way of their mobile phone numbers or, more formally, by their Mobile Identification Numbers (“MINs”).
While this poses no problems for the pre-paid customer in situations where the VAS is a one-off or discrete service, for those services which offer financial rewards for volume use or use-over-time, relying on MINs for identification can be financially detrimental to the pre-paid customer if they lose the SIM to which the MIN is ascribed.
As an example, the applicant offers a VAS under the trade mark “SOS”. The SOS service “lends” phone credits to a customer who sign up using their mobile phone number. A first time customer is “lent” up to three (3) text messages on sign up. This means that should the customer run out of pre-paid credits, they can still send up to three (3) text messages which are paid for or guaranteed by the SOS service provider. These “lent” credits are then deducted from the user's MNO pre-paid balance immediately or shortly following a top up payment.
Over continued use, the SOS service develops a more informed assessment of each of its customer's usage, top up behaviour and the like, ultimately leading to some measure of their credit worthiness. In line with this information, the SOS service can then offer varying and higher “credit lines” to the customer (for example, an increase in the amount of text messages that they may make once they have exhausted their pre-paid credit with the MNO). This credit assessment is of financial value to the customer.
As a pre-paid customer though, if the customer should ever lose or damage their SIM card, the customer has no way of verifying their identity with the SOS service. This means that the credit assessment associated with the lost mobile phone number is no longer available to the customer and the customer must establish a new credit assessment via a replacement mobile phone number or MIN.
While an obvious solution to this problem is to require that pre-paid customers register their names and other particulars with the MNO, and thus have the financially valuable information associated with their registered details rather than their mobile phone number or MIN, this is not always possible or convenient.
One example of this difficulty is that pre-paid mobile phones can be purchased from a range of outlets and not just from those owned or operated under license from the MNO. Thus, at the time of purchase, a large number of customers do not have access to the infrastructure or mechanisms necessary to record identifying information with the MNO. Even if such infrastructure or mechanisms are available outside of proprietary channels, the greater the amount of time that passes since purchase the less chance there is that the customer will act to record their identifying information with the MNO.
Additionally, there are always some customers that—for whatever reason—do not want their identifying information recorded with an MNO. Other customers simply do not register on the belief that their SIM will never be stolen or damaged contrary to recent evidence which shows that the most common reasons for loss of MIN are:                damage caused by repeatedly swapping SIMs into a phone; AND        locking of the SIM following repeated failure of an authentication procedure.        
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system that allows financially valuable information to be transferred or shared between phone numbers, one of which being an unregistered pre-paid mobile phone number.